My group was ginormous: more than 30 people showed up at the staging area. I had a pre-planned route that I was hoping to take, hitting booths in a great big circle, and representing (in my mind, at least) a fair assortment of different kinds of tools. I wanted to show them an agent development platform (the Witness/Blue Pumpkin combo made sense), and then I wanted them to see a couple of different approaches to Performance Management. (Attentive readers will know that this is an area I've been fascinated with for a few months now.)

Here's what was so interesting about the tour. Every time we'd go to a booth, we'd listen to the pitch given by the vendor rep who was standing there. They had no idea that we were coming – it was literally an ambush, and some of them were less than happy with the sudden onslaught of attentive attendees. They were all good sports, I have to say, and they all handled it with aplomb.

After each visit, I took my crew off to the side to a quiet area, and we talked among ourselves about what we'd just heard from the vendor. Did you understand what he/she was talking about? I asked them. We talked about the modes of pitching the vendors used, how they tried to keep on-message, and I gave the attendees some very frank advice in how to move the vendors off-message. Ask them about their own particular call center experiences, I told them. Many of these marketing and sales folks actually do have a history working in call centers – make a human connection on that level, and use it to get the vendor to drill down to your precise situation. Ask them how their product is going to work under your conditions

I think that this kind of talk went over well with the attendees. I think it was an eye-opening experience for them, to have an editorial assist when asking their questions. By the end of the tour, which lasted just an hour, I think they went away prepared to engage with vendors in a much less passive, much more collaborative way. That's got to be good for the vendors and product marketers, if only because it speeds the process along and cuts to the golden moment when the tire-kicker realizes that a tool is a real possibility or just isn't for him.

In any case, from my point of view, it was fascinating to step back and actually explain to real readers why I think things are interesting, to talk about my technological preferences, my methods of extracting useful information from vendors. About how to weigh hype-laden pitches against my own experience and the pitches from competitors. In the end, we changed course and visited vendors based on the things attendees wanted to learn about. So it became a collaborative exercise instead of a lecture.